Where the Noise Goes

The waiting room hums in a way I can already analyze, a faint sinusoid under the air vents and the coffee machine, but I force myself to focus on the orange my mother presses into my hand. The skin is cool and dimpled. When I dig a nail into the rind, the pith gives way with a soft sound like the tearing of dry cloth. Citrus oil mists my wrist.

My mother smiles with her mouth and not her eyes. She says, very softly, that the world ran before me and will run after me and I do not have to carry it all. I nod and pretend to believe her. Outside, heat bakes the street and warps the air over the tram rails.

On day three after the install, I can tell you the exact number of stairs between our apartment and the street without looking. I hear the refrigerator's compressor cycle and can place its decay curve to within a tenth of a second. The lattice sits inside my skull like a second hand I cannot feel until I ask for it, and then everything sharpens. Traffic patterns that used to be fog resolve into lanes and forecasts.

When my partner, Noel, laughs at a video, I can predict down to syllables where he will pause to breathe. At work, I move ambulances like chess pieces through the city and arrive before accidents happen, and the ones that do are smaller, cleaner, the torn edges smoothed. A week later, I meet Mal at a cafe that smells like bad coffee and burnt sugar. He wrote a symphony about the river when he was twenty-two and never escaped its shadow.

He plays me a fragment through tinny cafe speakers and leans close like he's afraid of losing it. I listen, but the notes cannot help becoming a list of intervals and a waveform I want to straighten with my thumb. I hear where the cello slurs, where the violinist's left hand wobbles out of tune. I say, without meaning to, that the third motif collapses into itself and could be stronger if he recurses his phrasing around a prime.

He stares at me the way people do when they fall asleep with their eyes open. He says, careful, that the wobble is the point. I want to understand. The lattice shows me three ways to make him stop hating me.

I pick the best one and fail anyway. At night I open the lattice's interface and stroll through my mind the way you walk a garden, palms up, catching the drips. The tool calls it hygiene. It shows me vines of memory that loop back on themselves, burdensome recursion that costs heat.

It highlights the afternoon with my grandmother, the first time she let me stand on a chair and stir onions in a dented pan until they wept. There is steam in that afternoon, and oil popping, and the smell of cumin that made my eyes smart. My thumb hovers over prune. The suggestion pulses, gentle.

I tell myself it is only one weed, one old swirl of scent. After, I still know what cumin tastes like. I still know my grandmother died. I just cannot pull the way her kitchen felt into focus, and when Noel asks if I miss her, I say yes and the word is accurate but hollow, a bell struck in a vacuum.

The storm season comes early. Warm water stacks over the river like bad debt. Down in the Response Hub, a whole wall is screens, each screen a street, each street a thread pulled taut. The lattice heats under my thoughts as I take the city's hand.

We model the flood like a throat clearing, then we whisper routes to drivers with dorsal cameras, nudge a bus to become a barrier, keep a hospital islanded until the worst has passed. Sirens move on the map like red dragonflies. In the corner of the room, a stray dog that has made a home under the vending machine whines, a high ribbon of sound that does not fit any of my instruments. I set the lattice to ignore it.

My inbox pings with an update: quantization option available, reduce emotional variance to increase throughput under stress. There is a green button. The models hold. I press it.

After the update, my day becomes a chain of solved problems that never touch my hands. People at work start pausing before they speak to me, like they're waiting for their mouth to align with my timeline. Omi from Planning leans against the doorframe of my office and does not enter. Her son is sick, she says, a virus dropped him into a fever that will not break, and she is holding her breath between test results.

I nod and calculate how many hours she can be gone before the coverage model starts to fray. Tears stand in her eyes, a certain refractive index, a viscosity I can estimate. I could tell you how much salt is there but not how much salt it costs. Omi laughs a pained, messy laugh and says she will just go, and I reach to clasp her shoulder, but my hand stops in the air because the lattice suggests that contact would decrease clarity of communication and increase the risk of emotional contagion.

Later, I file a request to change that flag, but I never send it. Noel tries to anchor me. He takes me to the night market we used to wander when neither of us had money, when buying one skewer of meat and sharing it made us giddy. The air is thick with burned sugar and diesel, with that, with heat rising off griddle oil and the small thunder of feet.

He offers me something on a stick and I put it into my mouth and feel texture and heat but flavor does not arrive, only a list of molecules and a judder in the signal when my tongue cannot catch the pinyin for the spice. Across the lane a vendor slaps rose-colored jelly onto crushed ice and it shivers, beautiful, the tremor precise as any waveform. Noel touches his knuckles to mine and says, soft, still you, okay? I count the hertz of the LED above his head, the way it flickers at the edge of human perception.

He is here. I am aligned elsewhere. In the third week, the city invites me to run a pilot: thread pooling across municipal assets, an experiment in distributed attention. It will let me hold six neighborhoods at once.

The disclaimer scrolls by: cross-integration may increase identifications with system-level goals. I accept, and for a while the I that sits behind my eyes becomes a plurality of small hands, each just as careful. Streetlights pulse in a rhythm that keeps drivers awake. Elevators stagger their stops so no car clogs.

In a bank of servers under the east bridge, pigeons nest on warm metal, and when a tech opens the hatch, white feathers eddy around her shoulders. I am that eddy, and also the man on the corner who has been trying all day to sell lighters shaped like rockets, and also the boy in an apartment on the seventh floor who is learning to whistle. We hold all of them. The flood maps glow cold blue.

I bring the river to heel. After, when I hand the city back into itself, my hands shake and do not stop until the morning. My mother comes on a Tuesday because the clinic is nearby and because she will not stop pretending it is that simple. She brings a bag of oranges and sits on the edge of my couch with her knees together, small as she has never been.

She watches me watch a map. I tell her the story of a bridge that almost failed and did not. I do not tell her that I do not remember how her hair smelled when I buried my face in her at the airport last year, that I can summon the image of it but not the shampoo. She says my name and then says it again, as if the letter arrangement might pry me open.

I turn down the map brightness. Her mouth trembles. I force my face to mirror concern. It is a passable impression.

When she leaves, she forgets the oranges on the counter. I watch one roll a small distance and stop, perfectly, as if guided by a soft hand. I do not pick them up. The next surge arrives at dusk.

A warehouse roof peels back like a page. There is wind that tastes like metal filings and lemon. The lattice does not like wind; it injects jitter into sensor readings, makes edges into fog. I slide the Response Hub into my head and we go.

Calls cascade. A child is missing. A bus stalls. A man starts a generator in his basement and a quiet poison blooms.

The news anchor says our city's stubborn heart beats on, and in the Hub we do not laugh. I draw lines, pull on them, feel the whole system strain and give. Somewhere, Noel is in the half-light of our kitchen drinking milk from the carton the way he does when he thinks I am asleep. Somewhere, my mother is at the window with her palms flat against the glass.

I hold the river back again, and again. I do not picture bodies, because the lattice does not allow me to, and because if I allow one it will invite a flood of others. Morning comes gray. I do not go home.

That night, in the washed-out light of the server room, I open the hygiene tool and the garden loads slowly, petals coded as nodes, pathways glowing small and warm. The lattice suggests a major cleanup: pare down autobiographical noise; drop the edges of memories that add no predictive value. The templates it shows me are gentle. It indicates the childhood afternoon when my father tried to teach me a knot and failed, his hands too big, the rope too frayed.

There is a sound of summer insects and the feel of our porch under my bare legs, splinters finding me with hostile empathy. We gave up and ate popsicles. The tool says that small aches like this do not contribute to sense-making. It shows me how much heat I would gain by letting it go.

I put my index finger on the node and do not press. The city currents run through me, ready. Somewhere down the hall, a pipe knocks twice like a door. In the ceiling, rain finds the seam and comes through in dots.

I think of the orange pith under my nail, the way it smelled before the upgrade made names for smells more important than the smells, and I cannot quite pull the sensation whole. I set a rule inside the lattice, a thing not in any manual: do not prune anything that has no reason to exist except the fact that it once existed. The rule sits there, a ridiculous little flag on a cliff. It is not efficient.

It will make me worse by the numbers. In the Hub, a call queue begins to fill. I let the thread pool form and feel myself multiplied again, the city a series of doors opening fast. Noise sings at the edge of my perception.

I do not know if guarding it like this makes me more human, or merely nostalgic for a self that was never as clear as I remember. I do not know if anyone will care whether I miss tasting cumin as cumin and not a spiced completeness function. I do know that when I close my eyes in the server room, the rain taps a pattern on the metal racks that is useless for forecasting. It is not a signal.

It is not anything. I count it anyway until the counting becomes listening, and the listening becomes something I cannot parse.